2016 Electronic Design Salary and Career Report: Struggling to Stand Out
This report does not examine salaries for specific jobs, education levels, and locations. Instead, it provides a diagnosis of entire electrical engineering workforce. Future articles will study the data in more detail.
While employers are paying more for engineering expertise, they are also having trouble finding qualified job candidates. Around 41% of respondents said that they had difficulty hiring analog engineers, up 4.8% from five years ago. Nearly 33% are striking out with embedded designers, a 4.1% increase from five years ago.
Higher salaries have done little to alleviate work concerns, such as long working hours—most engineers spend 14 hours each week working outside the office—and tight deadlines for delivering products. These concerns have remained extremely consistent over the years.
The survey was conducted as the job market for electrical engineers slowed. In the United States alone, the number of electrical engineering jobs in 2015 was 315,900, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That number will likely remain the same for the next eight years, the agency said.
In the written responses to the survey, many engineers shared their views about the job market. Many respondents pointed to companies employing people with specialized knowledge, while outsourcing general tasks like manufacturing and testing. Others pointed out that there were tons of opportunities for young people—but the number of engineers entering the industry is dwindling.
“Engineering jobs continue to change. As long as you are willing to keep up with it, the opportunities continue to exist,” said one of the engineers that answered the survey. Others said that those opportunities are difficult to turn into jobs: “It seems like employers are much pickier and less willing to take chances on people,” said another respondent.
There are also new opportunities for engineers working in high-growth industries, like renewable energy, biomedical engineering, and the Internet of Things. With venture capital firms raising record amounts of funding, there are also opportunities for engineers to work for start-ups.
What has not changed over the last few years is that respondents want to see more young people in engineering. Nine out of 10 survey respondents said that they would recommend engineering as a career path to young people. While engineering jobs have their shortcomings, there is always room for young engineers to grow, they said.
